The competition: homepage design, and the voting is simply, “Which intranet homepage do you think would be most helpful to its employees?” And the email even includes a link to a few samples submitted. I clicked the link and got something all too familiar.

Here is a PDF with some before and after stats, benchmarking my intranet against our corporate intranet, and survey results. It might be of value to you, especially if you’re poor like me and can’t afford real benchmarking metrics.

Most interesting survey result: least common response for “what would you like to see on the intranet?” was blogs. They would rather have industry news and the weather. Weather?!

Don’t get too excited for the PDF. It’s not a cool infographic or anything. Just some slides and graphs showing what matters to employees, what they liked and what they didn’t like…

Update: June 2, RE: surveys
Information about the surveys.
Slides 2, 3, 4 and 13 were taken from a survey that was on the intranet, and it had a little more than 100 responses.
The rest of the slides were taken from a survey that our corporate healthcare system did, and more than 3,000 people from our hospital responded (there was an Ipod incentive I believe).
We have a little more than 9,000 employees total.
Our intranet receives about 1,000 unique visitors a day, 3,000 a month.

This is coming after losing our office Biggest Loser competition – again. And after suffering from low blood pressure and iron. I need some hydration, and I don’t like water, and coffee and soda don’t count. So I’m sort of excited for my Gatorade.

And as noted above, my illness is so secret. So really it’s the sick high school kid inside me who could never play sports who is excited to have an 8-pack of Gatorade in my apartment right now. Makes me seem cool, active and athletic. And I am I’m healthy, a sailor and injured skier (bruised rotator cuff). Yeah, I sort of sound like a badass right now talking about my Gatorade and bruised rotator cuff!

What are some other ones? I’m on patientslikeme.com in the transplant community. But what patients have strong communities, and which ones are strong for making healthcare decisions? I can see how transplant is strong, but we don’t need to make a lot of healthcare decisions. Diabetes patients however, do make a lot of decisions I bet, like what is the best glucose meter, etc.

So as a marketer, who are these communities? And which ones do you market towards? Both? The ones who need to make decisions? The ones with a strong relationship? Regardless, there’s so much opportunity out there. Very exciting and reassuring for us online marketers

Warning to viewers: Know that design is only part of building an intranet. Don’t forget about function, navigation, etc. Don’t get caught up in the design and end up with a product your viewers hate just because you loved the Flash screen and green colors. (See cartoon below.)

Now you may proceed!

Slideshow of examples: http://www.slideshare.net/viewstudio/view-intranet-credentials-6610701

Case studies with screen shots: http://intranet-matters.de/intranet-case-studies/

@rachellai83 shares screen shots on her company’s website at Intranet Connections.

Intranet Benchmarking Forum (@ibf) shares screen shots:
http://www.ibforum.com/news/44520/My-Beautiful-IntranetMyBeautifulIntranet.htm

And the @ibf Facebook group: http://www.facebook.com/home.php#!/group.php?gid=2723005032&v=photos

Intranet Innovation Winners from 2010 by @steptwodesign: http://www.steptwo.com.au/products/iia2010/winners-iia2010

For more guidance on intranet maintenance, design and creation, visit THE LIST of Intranet Resources.

How to transform your intranet in a week by @digitaljonathan

7 techniques to improving your intranet by @ibf

And of course the Top 12 intranet posts of 2010 by @lindabolg

Here’s a million dollar example. Hopkins Medical Center, a leading academic medical center, uses direct mail as a major source for their patient-directed marketing. They sent letters to 300 patients who just had bariatric surgery. The letter talked about the benefits of body sculpting, and then it was signed by their doctor.

Cost for mailing 300 letters: $2,285
Net Revenue: $2,290,000
Contribution Margin: $1,079,000

For direct mail, you must have a specific call to action (ie purchase body sculpting). You must have a targeted audience (people who just had hundreds of pounds surgically removed) and a nice look to the mail (formal letter from the doctors).

At my hospital, we offer dozens of free events and classes to the community. For about a dozen of them, we send them an invitation in the mail. On average, roughly half of the people who attend the events come from direct mail. And on average we get $30 million in net revenue a year from new patients who attended an event, and half of them came because they received a postcard or letter in the mail inviting them to it.

Saying direct mail is dead is a strong statement, and it’s flat out wrong. Are we sick of junk mail? Of course! Is direct mail junk mail? It shouldn’t be.

It’s a PDF because I wanted to use the little icons from Andrew Wright’s presentation.

HowToMakeContentSocial

Here are some highlights from the survey.

• Three out of four respondents give it its own distinct name, as well as a look and feel different from the external Web site’s.
• Only a small portion of respondent organizations offer a personalized experience for users.
• Only one in three respondents use metrics to evaluate its effectiveness.
• Nearly one in four respondents do not offer any remote access to it.
• Three out of four provide community terminals for non-desk bound employees to access.
• Employee directories and internal search are extremely common features. Multimedia, CEO blogs, and social media are less popular.